Day 5 update!
During this day I got a simple tutorial intro worked out. Basic controls/abilities unlock as the game plays out & tutorial tip notify you of what the controls are. So you cant miss a tip, and theres no holding up the game if you already know what youre doing.
A big chunk of time this day went towards fixing some bugs that have crept in to the character controller. Ive been noticng them now for days, but one in particular I had to tackle. The biggest issue was the movement of the player was off by a certain amount. So youd press forwards and the Shiba would veer off to one side. Anywhere from 0-45 degrees - so it was pretty bad. It made character controls very difficult and frustrating, which is not good at all for a platformer. The bug evaded me for quite a while but I finally tracked it down to 2x things, firstly the custom 'drag' Id implemented, which let the Shiba slide a tiny bit instead of coming to a complete stop. It turned out this wasnt 'cutting back' on momentum as much as I thought it was. So there was 'leaking' momentum, plus another issue, angular momentum was way too low which lead to some 'floaty' rotational handling which made this effect even worse. After ramping up drag and tweaking my own custom drag to assist it, things were feeling much better, much more responsive and satisfying to control.
Debugging in action (gives you a look behind the scenes with the camera controller in action too)
Debugging 'the bug'. The above frame shows the issue clear as day. The red vector is the direction Shiba is moving in. The green vector is where he *should* be heading, its the direction the force is being applied, but Shiba's *actual* movement vector is 'drifting'. This makes for very wonky gameplay...
Jumping was also very flawed and 'floaty'. The solution for the movement issue meant drag was now super high, so falling was happening very slowly. I had to add custom gravity code to my controller as well, to boost and control falling. This ended up working well and with the added control over falling I could add a more 'floaty' feeling for the jump for a moment, think cartoon style, so Shiba hangs in the air for a moment after jumping and then come down faster and faster.
*Another* issue was slopes. You could walk right up any level of slope which was a problem since Shiba basically felt like a tank which could go anywhere. Some physics materials and more adjustments to drag... and larger slopes were impossible to walk up, while leaving small slopes easy to move along and 'grip'.
With these issues fixed + a ton of other tweaks to smooth out the movement experience, movement - the character controller is good enough to call complete.
Shiba is jumping with joy!
One thing Im behind on is level creation (and other characters eek). During day 5 I pushed to get the first and second area design and models done, Ive even got most of the detailing completed. It just needs filling out with more 'stuff' to do and objectives/goals + characters to make the world feel alive & give you more purpose. Thats going to be the main focus of the next 2x days.
Some updated level screenshots from today:
So yep - at this point Ive got a good deal of features working well but not enough 'game'.
Days 6 & 7 will be a lot of level design and content creating.